There's a good book by Michael J. Gelb
called How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci.
I've linked to the author's home page above and here for your convenience.
Yet before I linked to Gelb's page, I wrote my headline above.
You'll see why as I extend the entry with a passage from one of my reporter's notebooks
that I carried during my term as a Visiting Fellow (Professor) at Harris Manchester College,
University of Oxford in 2005.
Here is the entry, from 04 May 2005.
It is numbered from the sequence of entries I was making during that one stint in the notebook:
4.2.4 How to act/do like/as Leonardo da Vinci:4.2.4.1 Keep a notebook. L's notebooks are treasured to this day. One of the most impt purchases Bill Gates made when he became the world's richest man, was to buy a notebook of Leonardo da Vinci. He bought it from a wealthy oil company owner--Occidental Petroleum's Armand Hammer.[1] [1 cite]
4.2.4.2 So keep a notebook. Mark Twain did (cite volume 3 of Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals).
4.2.4.3 Here is what Walter Benjamin said, the great German literary critic and essayist:
"Let no thought pass incognito. Keep your notebook as carefully as the authorities keep their registry
of aliens." [From "13 Theses on Writing."]
Here you have three great thinkers who used a notebook to remember what they thought
and observed.
I remember this observation from 2005, when I was in Oxford thinking about the Information Renaissance
in a city that was inspired by the European Renaissance.
And I wrote it down in my notebook.
That is how today I bring it to you.
Work like Leonardo da Vinci. Keep a notebook.